Bloomberg tells New Yorkers to "Recycle Everything"

Bloomberg tells New Yorkers to "Recycle Everything"

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is telling New York City residents to "Recycle Everything," in an attempt to jump-start recovery rates in the Big Apple in his last year in office.

With a new "Recycle Everything" ad campaign in tow, Mayor Bloomberg this week announced a number of recycling-related goals and program expansions including increasing the city's overall recycling rate and expanding the city's growing composting program.

At present, New York City diverts just 15 percent of its waste stream, with an estimated 8 million tons of solid waste landfilled each year. By 2017, Bloomberg announced he would like to see the city double its rate to 30 percent, a still-modest goal compared to rates in San Francisco (77 percent) and Seattle (50 percent).

The city's recently-expanded composting program will be augmented yet again as part of the announcement. This time, composting will be introduced in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs over the next year, with a goal of eventually reaching 100,000 households and providing composting at every public school by 2015.

"The 'Recycle Everything' ad campaign and the expansion of our organic food waste recycling program shows how far New York has come in managing the 11,000 tons of waste generated every day," Mayor Bloomberg said at an announcement in Morningside Gardens in Manhattan, where organics collection began in June. "Together, these initiatives will help us double our recycling rate by 2017 and reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills and I want to thank Grey for their incredible designs for our public information campaign. These ambitious policies will save at least $60 million in taxpayer dollars and have a significant environmental impact, making them the type of investments we need to secure the City’s future."

When asked if he envisioned New York could one day go as green as San Francisco, Bloomberg told Capital's Dana Rubinstein, "Well, I don't know. But I know we can do an awful lot better."